Slashdot Mirror
Shutdown Cost the US Economy $24 Billion
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Time Magazine reports that according to an estimate from Standard & Poor's, the government shutdown, which ended with a deal late Wednesday night after 16 days, took $24 billion out of the U.S. economy and reduced projected fourth-quarter GDP growth from 3 percent to 2.4 percent. The breakdown includes about $3.1 billion in lost government services, $152 million per day in lost travel spending, $76 million per day lost because of National Parks being shut down, and $217 million per day in lost federal and contractor wages in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area alone. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers bore the economic brunt of the shutdown but small businesses also suffered from frozen government contracts and stalled business loans. With the deal only guaranteeing government funding through January 15, the situation could grow worse. 'This is a real corrosion on the economy,' says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics. 'If we have to go down a similar road in the near future, the costs are going to continue to add up.'"
It is easy to show "savings" if you double count them.
HHS Secretary Sebelius admits to double-counting in Obamacare budget
Obamacare Remains a Budgetary and Policy Disaster
CBO now projects that Obamacare’s Medicare and Medicaid cuts will reduce federal spending by over $700 billion over the coming decade. (Most of the cuts come from Medicare, although CBO did not break the estimate down by program.) However, these cuts are being double-counted.[4] The cuts are being used to replenish the Medicare trust fund for hospital and other institutional care and pay future Medicare claims. Over the next 75 years, this will add about $8 trillion to the government’s unfunded liabilities. Over the next decade, when the double-counted cuts are taken out of the equation, Obamacare adds at least $340 billion to projected budget deficits.
Medicare’s chief actuary has repeatedly pointed out that the cuts themselves are very unlikely to be sustained over the medium and long terms, because they would cause severe access problems for seniors. Defenders claim that Obamacare will slow the pace of rising Medicare costs by implementing more efficient ways of delivering services. However, Obamacare’s Medicare savings come from blunt, across-the-board payment rate reductions that are implemented without regard to the quality of care provided to beneficiaries.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If shutting down the government for a few days hurts GDP noticeably, then that's your problem right there.
On the bright side: The taxpayer just saved $24 billion.
No sig today...
Really? You mean hospitals don't use debt collectors anymore to try to collect on unpaid debts? Must be news to all of those we were hearing about being forced into bankruptcy due to medical bills during the passage of Obamacare!
If you start off so wrong from the beginning... can we really trust anything else you've said?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
35% of our income goes to war.. American's are not so weird.. We are tired of frivolous spending and policing the world. We already pay a ton in taxes we don't need to pay 10% more because our federal government can't manage a budget. If they were a business they'd have gone belly up a long freaking time ago.